Monday, February 9, 2015

Kids and Commercials

When I was a small child, the rule at home was that my younger
brother and I were only allowed to watch shows that aired on PBS
unsupervised. The main reason was because these were educational, but
looking back I think another big reason was that "Reading Rainbow" and
"Ghostwriter" only ran with the most minimal and unobtrusive
advertisements, if at all. Anti-ad sentiments were common. I had
friends who were allowed to watch network television, but had to mute
the commercials. Other parents used VCRs to time-shift programming and
edit the commercials out. Some ignored broadcast television completely
in favor of videos borrowed from the local library.

My
parents were never that extreme, and watched plenty of television
themselves. As long as they were around to explain things, I was allowed
to watch a lot of things in the evenings that weren't age appropriate.
Eventually, around age eight, I had complete unrestricted access to
cartoons on most afternoons. I wasn't the type of kid to fixate on
certain toys or breakfast cereals, and never whined for them, so my
parents eventually stopped worrying so much about what I was watching.
However, the ads definitely still made an impact on me. I still
remember many of them better than the programming that they ran with,
since some campaigns and characters persisted for years. I remember
Fred Flintstone from the Fruity Pebbles commercials more than I remember
him in "The Flintstones."

So I find it absolutely
fascinating that the kids growing up now in cord-cutter households have
much less exposure to traditional commercials. Netflix and Amazon
Prime offer big libraries of children's programming without a single
ad-break. You can find a lot of the old cartoons I used to watch on
other ad-free platforms. And since kids put much less of a premium on
watching new and recent shows, is it any wonder that these services are
now taking a huge bite out of cable and traditional
television viewership? Recent ratings
numbers show that kids' programming is suffering some of the
worst drops in viewership due to cord-cutting. Nickelodeon and the
Disney Channel have been feeling the impact the most heavily, and it's
no surprise that Nick recently announced that they'll be launching their
own streaming service in the near future.

This
doesn't mean that kids aren't still being bombarded by advertisements
though, especially online. Some parents may end up missing the days of
TV commercials, because digital advertising can be much more pernicious
and difficult to spot, requiring more vigilant monitoring. Think
about the amount of spam, clickbait, and viral videos in circulation
that are really just thinly-veiled ads. Mobile games are notorious for
pushing in-app purchases. Heck, think about the new "My Little Pony"
cartoons and "The Lego Movie." There are always going to be companies
trying to sell kids their products in some form or another. And that's
not necessarily a bad thing.

Commercials may have
been an annoyance, instilling questionable messages, and ensuring a
disturbing degree of brand recognition in our young minds ("cuckoo for
Cocoa Puffs!") but they were also our earliest lesson in media
awareness. Being exposed to them taught me to differentiate between
different types of content and to identify different advertising
tactics. And those are vital skills in the information age. So I don't
think that a commercial here and there, clearly marked, is as harmful
as some paranoid parents think. I mean, every so often even "Sesame
Street" was obliged to cede some air time to PBS pledge drives.

Digital
media offers more control than parents had in the analog era, and some
services have format and content options for advertisements. I can
imagine at some point, conscientious parents will be able to pick and
choose what kind of ads their children can view. "Frozen" dolls and
Tonka trucks, yes. Cinnamon Toast Crunch, no. However, I imagine that
most cord-cutters will be trying to avoid ads entirely, and raising kids
who are not just cord-nevers, but commercial averse ad-nevers. And
that's where things get interesting.

Exposure to
commercials will happen eventually of course, but think of a world where
the default assumption is that kids don't see their first McDonalds ad
until they're eleven or twelve, when they can think and reason more
carefully. Think of kids who never develop a fondness towards cereal
box mascots or display Pavlovian responses toward branding jingles and
catchphrases.

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About Me

Hello. I am a female thirty-something visual media junkie, who spends way too much time consumed with television, films, internet videos, and the fandom associated with them. So I might as well blog about it. Here I will chronicle my adventures in media - reviews, meta, articles, recs, and musings.